Tag: clothes

Baby steps, again

I feel frustrated, so I’ll just share my list of goals to accomplish for tomorrow before 2:00-ish PM.

For tomorrow, anyhow, my goal is to hang up as much hanging clothing as is now possible in the closet space I cleared out the other week; then finish filling my dresser with clothes; fill out and send the online requests for recommendations for my grad school app; and then, hopefully, start clearing off space on the table desk, so I can start using it soon.

I have to write two-ish essays for my application.

Post-a-day 2018

Tying up dirty boys with grammar

Changing laundry from the washing machine to the dryer (It’s a machine, I know!!!!!!!*), I saw a towel on the floor between the two machines.  It was originally intended for the load of red shades earlier today, but the load was too large for comfort, so I pulled out the towel.  I left it on the floor, because a towel load needed to be done today or tomorrow anyway, so why bother bringing it back upstairs just to bring it back down only hours later?  But that isn’t the point.

The point is (sort of) that I saw the towel sitting there, and I had an almost-urge to pick it up and put it in the dryer with the laundry I was transferring.  Not that I wanted to put it in with the clean laundry, but that, usually, whenever something is on the floor there, it is because it has fallen in the transfer between the two machines.  So, I simultaneously wanted not to touch the towel, to put it in the dryer, and to move it to the dirty towels upstairs (since I wasn’t doing the final two loads tonight, but doing them tomorrow).  And, for a good moment, I was worried that I would pursue the final of the three, and accidentally fulfill the second in my tiredness and in the middle of routine muscle movements, and then wish for the first.

I managed to let go of having to deal with the towel now, and I left it on the floor, for fear of the second result.

As I thought about that possible second result, I was practically distraught at how it would ruin the fact that I had already put the load of clothes on to wash.  By putting one single towel in the dryer, I thought, an entire load of laundry would be considered dirty.  Now, why doesn’t that work the other way around?  Why does one piece of clean laundry not make a load of dirty laundry clean, when mixed together?  The dirty still win out.  And how come a whole load of clean laundry can’t overpower the one dirty article?  The clean just can’t overcome.

And then – now, this is the point of this all – I wondered about what is life is like this, if anything.  Almost immediately, I thought about gender pronouns (and particularly in Spanish and French, because I learned those first).  It’s just like guys and girls.  A group full of guys, the dirty clothes, is (let’s use French) ils.  Add one girl, the clean clothing, and it stays ils.  A group full of girls is elles.  Add one boy, and it becomes ils.

So, no matter what, if there are any boys, it is ils, dirty.  The only way to keep it elles is to have only girls – no boys allowed.

And how odd that the boys are the dirty laundry and the girls are the clean… so like life, and I hadn’t even intended it to be so.**

Anyway, isn’t all of that fun?!  Towels to grammar to life comparisons – I do lead an extraordinarily interesting life, huh?  😛

 

 

*Japan doesn’t exactly do dryers.  People are expected to hang clothes outside, because every has a stay-at-home wife, you see… not.  Everyone used to have a stay-at-home wife, but the lifestyle hasn’t changed.  It just takes days and days to do laundry as a solo-liver, because weather can decide to soak your clean clothes while you’re off at work, or hide the sun from them, or be too humid for them to dry at all until they start to smell of mildew…  I just hung mine all indoors, because I’d heard too many stories from my brother’s issues.  Plus, supposedly people steal women’s underwear from the drying clothes in Japan.  I didn’t need to deal with any of that nonsense.  So, I set my air conditioner to a daytime setting to keep the apartment mildew-free, which also helped dry my clothes!

** I once wrote a poem about how boys are dirty.  I didn’t exactly believe any of it, but I knew that people thought boys were dirty and smelly, and I rolled with the idea.

Post-a-day 2017

Cultural Pants with Mom

Have you ever gotten creative with your clothing?  I certainly have.  Tonight was just an average ‘work with what you’ve got’ kind of night with clothes.  For tomorrow, I’d chosen to wear an Indian tunic – I think the actual name might be kurta, but I’m not sure.  However, I don’t have any pants or leggings that really go with the colors of it, and black is totally not an option, because its bright colors are just too happy for black.

So, I asked my mom if she had any leggings or pants I could wear with the top.  At first, she brought me Vietnamese yellow pants, which almost look Indian, but the color combined with the style was just not passable.  The tunic is a sort of reddish pink, with orange and green embroidery and stitching.  Bright yellow, baggy pants just weren’t the look I was going for.  I wanted the focus to be the top, not the bottoms.  I will wear said pants, however, on a different occasion, you can be sure.

After checking greens and purples, all to no avail, my mom brings in a skirt that is the exact color of the green embroidery and stitching of the tunic.  The fabric is different, but the color is darn near exact.  “But it’s a skirt,” I declared and repeated, somewhat laughing.  I tried it on.  My mom said it looked all right, but it totally was not the look I’d wanted.  ‘This is what we call “cultural confusion”…  I was going for “cultural fusion.”‘

We both laughed and stared at the perfect match of color and utter clash of styles.

And then I saw it.  “Aha!”  I bent over and grabbed the center of the skirt, both the front and back of it, through my legs.  As I stood up, my mom knew exactly what I was doing.

Five minutes later, we had it.  I eventually had to take it off and turn it inside out to make it all balance properly, but we knew it would work after the second knot I made while still wearing it.  We tied the skirt in a few places in the center to give the illusion of one type of traditional Indian pants (think Indian yoga pants), and it worked marvelously.  No, they don’t look exactly like the real thing, but they do look like what I’d wanted: cultural fusion and fabulous.

I wonder how it will go off tomorrow, in a world of latino heritage.  I look forward to the opportunity to respond to something like, ‘Cool pants!’ with a, ‘Oh, thanks.  I’m not wearing any.’  Or something silly like that.  We’ll see.  Whatever the case, though, I’ll be in an outfit that I love and that has been created with love from me and my mom.  I think that’s the best part, as usual, of course.

 

P.S.  I’ll see if I can get a photo of it all tomorrow at some point.

P.P.S.  Okay, so it turned out that I wore the yellow pants to bed, because it was so cold, and they were soft and comfortable.  Not what I’d had in mind when I considered wearing them soon, but oh, well…  😛

Post-a-day 2017

My very own “Pretty Woman” scene

You know the iconic shopping scene in “Pretty Woman”, where Julia Roberts tries on loads of fabulous outfits, and it just plain looks like a photo shoot?  Right, well, if you don’t, I suggest you get on that cultural tidbit, because it’s fabulous.  Anyway, so I remember a Cameron Diaz film having a sort of spoof on the scene, and, though I was somewhat unimpressed by the scene, I noticed a sense of something nigh to jealousy… envy with a little something more.  I want to do what they were doing.  I want to have my own BFF fake photo shoot at the clothing store, trying on amazing outfits, my subconscious cried.

And I’ve always remembered that, though I’ve never remember to do anything about the silent wish I’d had that day.  Tonight, as I was thinking of this one particular store where my family has shopped occasionally for most of my life, – it’s a discount outlet-type high-end clothing etc. store – I recalled a particular jacket that my cousin and I loved.  And then I remembered how we had both put one on in the store, and taken photos together. And then, like a rush of memory, I recalled a whoosh of different pieces we all had tried on together, and the loads of photos we took.  We had done our own “Pretty Woman” clothing store photo shoot, and I hadn’t even noticed.  Why?  Because we were just being ourselves.  We were attempting to recreate something we’d seen elsewhere.  We were just doing our own thing, being silly and fancy with high-end discount clothing etc. and having a wonderful time.

How cool is that?  I had hoped one day to copy the scene in my real life, but knew that it would be always that: a copy.  Instead, I got the real deal, and we had an actual spontaneous in-shop clothing photo shoot together.  Wicked.  I love life.  And family.  Especially family.

Post-a-day 2017

That Jacket

Tomorrow, I get to wear my brother’s pirate jacket, and I am thrilled(!).  At long last, I am granted not only the occasion, but the permission and the ability to wear the jacket, and it looks mighty fine with the ensemble, I dare say.

My brother bought it at this cool resale shop called Lucy in Disguise, in Austin, Tx.  When my mom had asked him what he had paid for the jacket, he said that it was “a bill”.  I thought he was just being funny, saying that he had handed over some bill of cash money, and the change came back to him, because he didn’t really remember what he’d paid for it, or because he was thrilled at having spent so little on it, that it was a five- or ten-dollar bill, maybe even a twenty.  However, as their conversation continued, I quickly discovered the term as being a vernacular synonym for the hundred-dollar bill.  That my brother would have paid such a price for something like that meant that it must be, it necessarily was outstanding.  And, truly, this jacket it.  I envied him for it from the first time I saw it.  I don’t even really love pirate-y things.  Yeah, they’re cool, but I don’t ever want or need them.  But this jacket was like (the cheesy tie-in of) treasure to me.  It is just that wonderful.

And I finally get to wear it.  Yippee! 😀

Post-a-day 2017